Winning the Vogue primary

Jon Huntsman continues to dominate the contest for East Coast media love, gracing the newest issue of Vogue in a lengthy profile illustrated with photos by Annie Leibovitz. Slate editor Jacob Weisberg describes Huntsman as a thoughtful Republican, comparing him to Barack Obama with help from Mary Kaye Huntsman:

As you listen to Huntsman’s blunt assessment of the country’s prospects, it’s hard not to notice the commonalities with the man he would challenge in 2012—the hazard Obama hoped to forestall by sending him to Beijing. There is, to begin with, the physical resemblance. Huntsman is slender, athletic, and stylish, with a winning smile. Huntsman is 51, Obama is 50, and both have an unusual reserve, a cool unflappability. More important is a shared fundamental outlook: substantive, patient, with a preference for compromise over confrontation, and a pragmatic rather than ideological approach to politics.

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When we chat at the airport, Mary Kaye tells me about the first time her husband and Obama met, in a holding room at Coretta Scott King’s funeral in 2006. She glimpsed some kind of spark, a connection between the two men, as if they knew that they would figure jointly in some future history.

The story also touches on Huntsman's less-than-orthodox relationship with his Mormon faith, with Weisberg comparing it to Reform Judaism:

People tend to see Mormonism as a binary, you-are-or-you-aren’t question, but Jon Huntsman is something more like a Reform Jew, who honors the spirit rather than the letter of his faith. He describes his family on his father’s side as “saloon keepers and rabble rousers,” and his mother’s side as “ministers and proselytizers.” The Huntsman side ran a hotel in Fillmore, Utah’s first capital, where they arrived with the wagon trains in the 1850s. They were mostly what Utahans call “Jack Mormons”—people with positive feelings about the Latter-Day Saints church who don’t follow all of its strictures. “We blend a couple of different cultures in this family,” he says.